Preventing asthma in babies before it starts would be the "holy grail", University of Newcastle Associate Professor Vanessa Murphy says.
A/Prof Murphy, deputy chair of the Asthma and Breathing program at Hunter Medical Research Institute, said "there's a definite link between a mother and child having asthma".
"Having a mother with asthma is a bigger risk factor than having a father with asthma," she said on Tuesday to mark World Asthma Day.
"If a mother's asthma can be well controlled, perhaps we can mitigate that risk for the child."
Studies show a link between asthma attacks and uncontrolled symptoms in pregnant women and a higher risk of their children developing the condition.
About 13 per cent of pregnant Australian women have asthma. Up to half of these women will need medical help for an asthma flare-up during pregnancy.
A/Prof Murphy's research team is examining how to better manage asthma in pregnancy to "potentially improve outcomes for the baby".
"We've been studying over 700 babies from the Hunter, who were born to mums who participated in our Breathing for Life trial," she said.
The children who participated in the trial will be followed up at the ages of four to six.
"We want to find out how their lungs are growing, whether they have any allergies and whether exposure to bushfire smoke might have affected their lungs."
The researchers will examine children with and without asthma.
"Even if your child is perfectly healthy, it's really important for us to understand what might have protected them from getting asthma."
The research team has been trying to understand "the early origins of lung health".
They found that baby boys of mums with asthma have "lower lung function at six weeks of age".
"This might affect their lung trajectory throughout life and put them at risk of poor lung health," A/Prof Murphy said.
"We've been looking at how the immune system develops and how this might interact with lung growth.
"We can see that inflammation in the baby's lungs as early as six weeks of age can predict whether they'll have a wheeze-related illness later in their infancy."
A/Prof Murphy said air pollution exposure can "alter the types of immune cells that are present in the umbilical cord blood".
Her research team is interested in knowing whether exposure to bushfire smoke will have "any influence on how the lungs grow".
"Children exposed to bushfire smoke have poorer lung function, especially children with asthma," she said.
"Mothers with asthma exposed to bushfire smoke have exacerbated symptoms and potentially asthma attacks.
"But what's unknown is whether the mother's exposure to bushfire smoke might affect the developing baby."
The research participants were followed during the "Black Summer" fires in 2019-20, so the researchers have an opportunity to get answers to this question.
"We'll be doing that by looking at epigenetics, or changes in the way the DNA is structured," A/Prof Murphy said.
The researchers will look for links between exposure to bushfire smoke in pregnancy and "health outcomes in the offspring".
The Breathing for Life participants will also be followed for "neurodevelopmental outcomes".
"There are some reports in the literature that suggest a potential link between immune conditions in pregnancy and the development of things like autism and ADHD," she said.
"There's not a lot of data in humans, so we've got a unique opportunity to see whether inflammatory markers in pregnancy might be related to those outcomes.
"The research we've done so far on that is very preliminary."
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